How to Monitor Advertising Effectiveness

By Adam | 2 Nov 2015 15:00:00

If you pay for some form of advertising for your eCommerce website, then you will doubtlessly want to know whether or not that advertising has been effective. These things aren't cheap and you want to be sure that you're spending your money well and that you aren't wasting it on something which will ultimately not benefit you. So what can you do to monitor the effectiveness of an advertisement? Sure, you might experience a boost in sales after paying for an advertisement in a magazine, but how can you be sure it wasn't just a coincidence? You might get a coincidental boost in sales and then erroneously believe that the advertisement caused it, pay for another of those advertisements and then lose money when nothing happens.

What you can use in this case is promotional codes. If you post an advert in a magazine which the promo code 'sharing' then if lots of the customers you get are using that code, they must have come to you through the magazine. It's quite simple, but it's a good way of monitoring these things. Not only will it help you to determine whether or not a piece of advertisement has been useful, but it is also more likely to encourage sales because if you have a promotional code people will feel like they are saving money and if there's one thing people love, it's saving money. While you may not make quite as much money on each individual sale, there's a good chance that once somebody has purchased from you for the first time, they may well go on to become a regular customer.

So I hope this gives you a good idea of how advertising effectiveness can be monitored. I hope that, if you do pay to take out any form of advertisement, this method will help you to see how worthwhile it was. If it, ultimately, doesn’t seem to work then you’ll know that it’s not worth doing again!